


A simple prayer.

by millygal



Series: Season 13 [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Gen, Graphic Description, Lucifer (Supernatural) in the Cage, Sam Winchester in Lucifer's Cage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 08:10:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13585920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millygal/pseuds/millygal
Summary: We are born, innocent.





	A simple prayer.

**Author's Note:**

> 13x12 ficlet. I couldn’t get this last episode out of my head, I couldn’t walk away from Sam’s time in the cage. I needed - something. As it turns out that something was the Prayer of Saint Francis as recorded by Sarah McLachlan (I have had an everlasting love for this song since my BtVS days) and some truly f*cked up images. Thank you to jj1564 for her swift beta and encouraging comments. Love you hun xx *rolls off her chair and goes to mop down her brow* I ‘spose this could be considered a song!fic. Okay it’s a song!fic, but it’s a disturbing f*cked up one.

_Lord make me an instrument of your peace._

Sam hangs limp, yet still somehow twitching, from a ceiling dripping with the despair of what feels like a thousand impossible souls who came before.

_Where there is hatred let me sow love._

Lucifer’s true face shimmers out from the flame licked darkness, and no matter how hard he tries to picture Dean’s smile, his brother’s never dampened smirk, all Sam can see is agony long after death.

_Where there is injury, pardon._

As yet another bone breaks under the strain of continuous pressure, inside the mortar and pestle of Lucifer’s will, Sam prays.

_Where there is doubt, faith._

Sam has always been a faithful man, a lower being who hopes for a higher power that saves and salves, but today, this day after so many days, he prays harder than he ever has before.

_Where there is despair, hope._

Another crunch, another peel of flesh from bone, another moment of begging whoever might be listening to let him die.

_Where there is darkness, light._

It takes a few hundred years, but Sam can finally see past Lucifer’s true visage, with those oxygen sucking orbits pressed in close, flaring every time the man beneath his boney foot cries out in pain.

_And where there is sadness, joy._

The tradition grows up slowly, without either of their knowledge, but whilst the ever present flames tickle Sam’s already cracked and blackened skin, he feels a release, of sorts, as Lucifer sinks his jagged teeth into the wet sloppy remains of the Hunter’s still beating heart, again. Again and again.

_O divine master grant that I may._

Sam has since ceased praying, but something in his ruined soul seeps out into the constantly contracting walls of the cage.

_Not so much seek to be consoled as to console._

The hallucinations are a balm upon his burning skin, washing over his almost completely obliterated soul.

_To be understood as to understand._

Sam sees Dean, sitting cross legged on the hood of the Impala, six - maybe seven years old, playing tic tac toe and enjoying the childlike glee that comes from a simple game.

_To be loved as to love._

He feels his spine snap for maybe the last time, but Sam knows he’s leaving this world, loved. Missed. Mourned for.

_For it is in giving that we receive._

The knowledge of that mourning stitches a strength back into Sam’s limbs, a strength that Lucifer doesn’t see coming and has no defense against.

_It is in pardoning that we are pardoned._

Forgiveness is not wholly what Sam feels, but it is in amongst the loosening of the ties to the cage that bind him here, with the Morning Star - the brightest most beautiful and artful murderer since the dawn of time.

_And it's in dying that we are born to eternal life._

Allowing himself to let go, to be relieved of this half life, and the torture he’s suffered for so many hundreds of years at the hands of Lucifer, Sam smiles, through split lips and eyeless sockets.

_Amen._

He awakes on the cot in Bobby’s basement, and for just a moment, Sam forgets that he’s ever felt the tug and pull of a fish hook embedded in his cheek, or the tips of Lucifer's fingers playing his ribs like a piano. 

The scent of Dean’s dime-store aftershave invades Sam’s lungs and he feels, for the first time in centuries, like he’s home and he can breathe, and hopes that the memories remain buried.


End file.
